This wonderful video below gives an overview of the effort to rebuild a fully working version of the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC). EDSAC was an early British computer from 1949 which was one of the first machines which was able to store software. The computer did this with little more than vacuum tubes, punched tape and a teleprinter: Read more…
By chance I was watching the Bloomberg TV show Game Changers and they had an interesting biography of Larry Ellison. Honestly not being a database guy I thought it was going to be dull, but then there was an amazing segment of the show which which explored Ellison’s lost project from the mid-90s: The Network Computer. Read more…
This amazing video clip below features Jean Bartik who was one of the first generation of computer programmers from the 1940s. Her first job was working on the ENIAC computer in 1945: Read more…
The above film titled The Electronic Coach was produced in 1959 by IBM to show off their IBM 650. My favorite part of the film is when the coach pulls out reams of paper in the middle of the game to figure out who to send out next on to the basketball court. Although while the technology looks awkward it’s important to keep in mind that the IBM 650 was one of the first mass computers ever made with over 2,000 shipping between 1954 and 1962. Read more…
The world of personal electronics is currently in an arms race to see who can come up with the smallest, coolest-looking entertainment devices, but there was a time when the mere concept of a “home computer”was almost unbelievable. Atari may not have had decades of staying power in the PC market, but the Atari name will always be synonymous with early efforts in home computing and video gaming, and these amazing technical drawings and pieces of concept art drawn up by Atari industrial designer Regan Cheng in 1981 show why. Read more…
This is teaser video for the Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing exhibition which will be staged at the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California in January, 2011. For me it’s a special treat to see the likes of Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt in the same video — but it shows you the geek love for those who came before. From what I can see the exhibition will offer a chance to see many gems in one location. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 10, 2010 in Fandom, Tech
As both a tech geek and a Space:1999 fanboy I loved this fan made video tribute to Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. I also found the entire steampunk look of the video quite pleasing: Read more…
The above heartbreaking video shows the founders of Sun Microsystems talking about the founding of the company which lasted from 1982 until they were acquired by Oracle in January of this year. As sad as I am for the company, the ability for any tech firm to to last for twenty eight years is an amazing feat. Their golden age for for me was in the late 80s when they dominated the workstation market. Read more…
Apple fanboys always love Jobs, however engineering fanboys will always love Woz. In this video Steve Wozniak recounts his creative process of bringing colors to personal computers. While I love the story what’s interesting to be as a videogame fanboy is hearing how he and Jobs were working on designing games at Atari. What’s fascinating is that Woz describes creating the games not as a software programming exercise but as a hardware project! Read more…
When everyone started talking about the cloud my first thought was “isn’t this a throw back to mainframe computers from a pre-PC era when dumb terminals always needed to dial in?” So I was blown away to watch this video of Vint Cerf (who has been credited as the father of the Internet) suddenly mention mainframe time-sharing in the middle of a chat on cloud-to-cloud operability. It’s also interesting to hear that Cerf feels that it will take about five years for real standards to occur that allow one cloud to share data with another. By the way it’s interesting to note that Google now employs Cerf which is quite a coup. Read more…
